About

Sports Balls Replaced With Cats is a single topic blog featuring photoshopped images in which balls from various sports games have been replaced with pictures of cats.

Origin

The “Sports Balls Replaced With Cats” (SBRWC) Tumblr[1] blog was launched on April 7th, 2013, with the first posted image featuring a rugby player getting tackled in mid-air while holding a small kitten (shown below).[2] Within four days, the post garnered over 40 notes.

Precursor: Boozecats

The photoshop meme Boozecats was created by Brooklyn resident Ryan Darrenkamp in July of 2009, featuring photographs in which alcoholic beverages have been replaced with superimposed cats (shown below). Darrenkamp subsequently created the Boozecats[15] single topic blog to highlight notable examples of the edited images.

Spread

On April 8th, 2013, Redditor Iammattieee posted a link to the Tumblr blog on the /r/funny[3] subreddit, where it received only 15 up votes in the next 72 hours. The same day, a Facebook[12] page titled “Sports Balls Replaced With Cats” was launched, which accumulated upwards of 1,800 likes within the same time frame. On April 9th, several notable examples from the blog were posted on the Internet humor site College Humor.[4] That same day, 24-hour comedy ticker site WitStream[5] reblogged a SBRWC post of a basketball player preparing to slam dunk a cat (shown below). Within 48 hours, the post gained more than 590 notes.

In the following days, compilations of SBRWC image posts were highlighted on several news sites and Internet humor blogs, including Mashable,[6] BuzzFeed,[7] The Daily Dot,[8] The Huffington Post,[10] NY Daily News,[11] Laughing Squid[13] and Pleated Jeans.[14]